6. The Teacher Shortage Mess: An Interview with Dr. Paul Bruno

In this episode, Trina introduces a continuation podcast discussing the teacher shortage crisis with Amanda and Dr. Paul Bruno, who co-authored an article attempting to quantify the problem. The discussion touches on the complexity and messiness of the data surrounding teacher shortages due to local control, where each district operates independently with little oversight. Dr. Bruno challenges the terms 'shortage' and 'crisis,' arguing that the data shows more teachers than ever, though they might not be in traditional classrooms. He also voices concerns about the press misrepresenting the issue, potentially leading to political agendas that dismantle public education. Trina and Dr. Bruno further discuss the difficulties of measuring the impact of teacher shortages on student outcomes and reflect on how specialized roles and new teachers affect classroom dynamics and effectiveness. The conversation concludes with insights into the need for targeted solutions, the limitations of current data, and the potential benefits of differential pay and elevating teacher leadership to address the crisis.

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Transcript

 Hello everyone, it's Trina. I'm here today introducing an episode that I recorded about a week ago with Amanda and Dr. Paul Bruno, one of the co-authors of the article that I talk about that attempts to quantify the sheer numbers of the teacher shortage crisis. And if you haven't listened to that episode, you should listen to that one first, because this episode is a follow up continuation and reaction episode to that one.

But the major findings of Dr. Paul Bruno's article was that, yeah, we do have a teacher shortage problem, but the bigger takeaway is that the data is a mess here. And that just intersects perfectly and beautifully with all of the problems that we discuss and all the thematic themes in our Teacher Shortage Crisis podcast because of local control, I.

And what we mean by local control is micro local control. Each district operates at its own little kingdom and island and really only beholden to school board members. And school boards are kind of cloaked. I mean, people barely even know who their school board members are, and they are not experts in our field, and they don't have our degrees and nor our expertise.

And so they're certainly not presently teaching. Um, and that's, that's the problem. And so since nobody's accountable to reporting some of this stuff, uh, coherently and consistently, we just don't know the extent of the problem. But in this episode, Paul and I both challenge each other a little bit and we have a firm mutual respect for each other.

But we both come at this problem from different perspectives, and I'm really excited to. Play this episode for you because there's a robust and nuanced conversation about the shortage crisis. And he has agreed to come on and speak about more topics. Right now he's really interested in how teacher pay might be intersecting with this issue.

And he's been asked repeatedly, you know, what are the impacts of the shortage on student learning? And these are both topics that we've explored extensively in the, in the podcast, but it's not the same as a scholarly article, you know? But the challenging in this episode you're about to hear is really about a couple of things.

So Paul takes issue, ironically enough, with the terms shortage and crisis, and he has his good reasons for that. Shortage is problematic and a bit, it's about semantics because each district sort of thinks about what is a shortage in a different way. Is it a vacancy that's not filled? Is it an underqualified teacher that's.

Being hired to fill a vacancy. And what do we mean by underqualified? Because Paul and I both agree that the standards that we place upon a lot of the states to hire a quote unquote qualified teacher, a lot of it's hoop jumping and it's not good predictors of future teacher efficacy. So shortage is problematic.

But crisis, I disagree with him on this. It is a crisis. And he sort of pushes back on that word because he's had this experience that honestly I have too with the press misrepresenting what is going on with the problem to the, to the public. So they show up the press the beginning of each school year, you know, open up a can of worms, light fire on it and, and say the US schools are an a disaster and the teacher shortage crisis is, you know, an epidemic.

And then walk away from it. And then. You know, refrain from fully peeling back the layers of that onion and really seeing what's really going on here. And Paul's position here is that he is concerned about a very concerted effort in the political world of the United States that would be very happy to take that crisis word, run with it, and use it as an excuse to dismantle education, K 12 education in the public sector, you know, forever, like completely dismantle the US Department of Education.

And there's already talk about that now. So he is very cautious about us adding fuel to a fire that could lead to the dismantling of public education altogether, which that's not what I want, you know, as, as critical as I am of Horace Mann who set this thing up in the 1830s. I respect that guy. He wanted free secular public education for all of America's youth because we are a democracy and we've got to be literate, and we've got to be educated so that we're not duped and we can vote in our own best interests.

So I understand all of that of what Paul is saying, but you know, he's no longer in the classroom and so he's not able to see the impact the way that Jess, Amanda, and I, and all of the teachers out there are seeing it. And one of the things he, he admittedly has, doesn't have the knowledge right now on the impact of teacher shortages on kids.

And that is something that we talk about a lot in this series. And particular, we talk about the impact on reading opportunity gaps. In US education and just how it's impacted our already really pronounced illiteracy problem in the United States. But he says that he makes this statement. Okay. And so I researched his comments before I recorded this intro.

He said that in the United States today we have the lowest student to teacher ratio that we've ever had, and we have the most teachers we've ever had. So he says that at the same time as he acknowledges there are not enough teachers. To fill the positions we have open. And he did mention that he thinks this high number student to teacher ratio may have something to do with the fact that we've hired a lot of teachers who don't have traditional classroom cohorts of kids.

So they're working with very small populations of students, or none at all. 'cause they're mentors or coaches. And I did some thinking and I did some reflecting and I did some reading and he's absolutely right about that. And he is the one who, in his paper, argued for nuanced perspective of the data and he argued for the application of a ratio in understanding the real impact of the vacancies on the ground floor for the kids.

So in his article he's saying like, look, if you just look at the raw numbers of vacancies in a district. To the extent that you're able to see that number because it's so hidden in a lot of places. But if you just look at that and you don't appreciate the overall population of that neighborhood, the overall number of students in that district, you might get a very incorrect idea about which districts and states or municipalities are most impacted by shortages.

And he's right. So in that instance, you absolutely need to look at a ratio, right? But when you are looking at the student to teacher ratios, that's where you need to take the ratio out of the equation. Because if we wanna look at how many teachers there are per students in a regular general education classroom, it's almost impossible to do that.

'cause if you ask teachers today, they're gonna say, uh, you know, I have friends who've been teaching for decades in the profession that they had far smaller classes decades ago. Right, but what Paul's saying is that there are more teachers today and lower student to teacher ratio. So how can that be? Well, it's pretty simple and I've learned about this researching the special education episodes you're going to hear later down the line.

Special education in the United States is very new, relatively new. It only really began in earnest in the eighties. So if you like, do research on student to teacher ratios in the fifties when they were at their highest, something like 26 students to um, every one teacher. And you look at them now at their lowest, something like 15 and a half students per teacher.

What's changed in those uh, years is the installation of special education. Those, uh, the laws. That rest upon special education passed in the seventies, and it took a number of years for us to create the systems. And I argue that they are oppressive systems and oppressive for kids, oppressive for special education teachers, oppressive for general education teachers.

Has it done more harm than good? No. I think in general, special education has helped more than it's hurt. But special education teachers have much smaller caseloads. Sometimes only four or five students, sometimes even less than that. Amanda has an ELD class right now and that's English language development of only two kids.

And so I wanna make that very clear here. Our class sizes are not smaller. They are not. And if you or anybody you know, can get me some scholarly literature on gen ed sizes over historically over the past few decades, please show me. Because simply looking at student to teacher ratios involves adding up the kids at a school, adding up the teachers at a school as a total number and then doing a division problem.

And that's not the way to look at this problem. It just isn't. The other thing that's missing from this conversation is a nuanced take on the lack of veteran teachers in a space because brand new teachers and Paul says he's met some that were not done with their credential coursework that he would have been proud to be as good as.

And I certainly have too. I have, but that is anecdotal and it doesn't get to the heart of the matter of the lack of veteran teachers. In spaces. There are certain spaces where if you are not veteran enough, you are doing harm. And I mentioned this in the meat of the episode when we talk about the reading opportunity gap.

And I think that's something that maybe Paul and I should talk more about because I know he is really motivated to learn more about the impacts of shortages on student learning. Because not only is like if you have no filled position in a first or second grade classroom, that's bad, but it's also bad if you have somebody who's just starting their credential coursework in a first or second grade classroom.

And it's also bad if they're brand new and highly qualified. Quote unquote, highly qualified because you can only know how to teach reading through experience. And there are a lot of kids who are suffering through year after year and the foundations of reading years with nothing but brand new teachers.

But the nuance about veteran teachers and the absence of veteran teachers in some of these most essential spaces, like also in special education because it's so much work to do. Those do that duty, to do that job, that the lack of a veteran teacher in those spaces is harming students too. And so lost, I think in this conversation is how do we keep the teachers we have, right?

Because a little bit. We are talking about just getting people in these classrooms to teach and not appreciating that it takes a long time to get good at this job. And we are losing too many teachers because the job is untenable. Like you get really good around year 10, year 11, but we're losing too many teachers around year five or six.

And so the lack of veteran teachers in our profession, the lack of enough of us, that is not discussed in this episode. And so I think I wanna challenge Paul to come back on and talk more about that because I would want to have that conversation with no other person than him. That is how much I respect him.

So I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Does the future of our nation and the world keep you up at night? Are you worried that today's kids won't be able to lead our nation through the troubles ahead? Well, so are we. We are creating a real discussion of what is actually causing the teacher shortage crisis, because we know that this crisis is an existential threat.

So we are forcefully inserting teachers' voices into the conversation to tell you the whole story. Because after years of watching decision makers who aren't even teachers, make all the wrong choices. We have turned into whistleblowers. K 12 education is a mess. So we can either listen to teachers and clean it up or watch as our democracy crumbles.

It's the Teacher Shortage Crisis podcast.

Hello everyone. Trina and I are so thrilled because today we have Dr. Hall Bruno from the University of Illinois, who wrote a very important paper that documents is there, national Teacher Shortage, and how do we find out and where are the numbers, where's the statistics? And he's done so much research digging into this topic and we're just so thrilled to have him here today.

And thank you. Thank you, Paul, for being here today with us. And I just want to start us off by asking you about your background as an educator. So yeah, go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, absolutely. Um, thank you for, uh, having me. Um, uh, I think this'll be a, a fun conversation. Um, so I, uh, I got started in education.

I was a middle school, uh, science teacher, um, in Oakland and then in Los Angeles, California. Um, and the, and it is for, um, five years. Um, I think, uh, and you know, over that time, uh, I started to, I moved around between a couple of schools for my, my family and, um, so I was interested in education at the time, but moving between schools, I also started to get more interested in like education policy and education administration because, um, I was sort of struck, maybe I was naive, but I was sort of struck a little bit between how different, uh, with how different my experiences were as a teacher in the different schools that I worked in as I went from one to another and for example, how, you know, and there were things that I, you know, I.

It felt, it turned out I felt very strongly about, and that were very different across these different schools. And I started to be more and more interested in like, why the different schools I was in, even though they were all in California, for example, you know, seemed to have very different levels of resources and to be run very different administratively.

And so I became sort of interested in, in those things, um, which eventually led me to, to pursue, um, those kinds of issues in, uh, in my PhD program. So I went back to, to grad school, um, at the University of Southern California and then to study. Um, but at the time I think they were calling Urban Education Policy.

Um, but uh, it got my PhD in that officially. Uh, and um. Started to study and now study, um, uh, issues of personnel administration, so things like teacher hiring and assignment and compensation and school finance issues. Um, and now, uh, so now, yeah, as you mentioned, I'm at the University of Illinois, um, in Urbana Champagne, um, where I'm an assistant professor of education, policy, organization and leadership.

And now I still, you know, those are still the things that I study. And also those are the things that I teach. Um, I teach mostly in our administrator endorsement programs where I teach things like school finance. Thank you for that. Um, I didn't realize that you, the impetus to get you into leadership was noticing how disparate the experiences were from district to district, even within the same state, because that was my experience.

And Amanda's as well, and even Jess, our other co-host, and I don't think. Moving districts to that extent is, is very common in education because of years of service. It kind of traps you in a place, which is a shame because you do get a really interesting perspective when you see how different things are and the way in which people think about and talk about what's going on and prioritize things is very different from place to place.

So I think that's really cool that you came into this kind of thinking the same way that we did. So my question for you, Paul, is when and why did you first become interested in the teacher shortage crisis? 'cause for me, it was me working on these really big foundational problems and then noticing that it was stemming from a lack of teacher autonomy and the bigger umbrella problem was the teacher shortage issues.

So how did you become involved in it? Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a little bit of a roundabout road and I think, you know, to a large extent, a lot of my, um, research interests can be summed up as just me being very easy to persuade that something is interesting and then other people, you know, there being other people I wanna work with and them convincing me that I should pursue things.

So, I mean, I think, you know, probably started a little bit when I was, um, in, uh, graduate school and some of my research with my advisor was with the Los Angeles Unified School District on their teacher hiring processes. Um, and starting to get a sense of sort of how different hiring might look for different kinds of positions, for example.

And so, and particularly in a place as large as Los Angeles, you know, for different school, you know, they've got something like a thousand schools or something. Um, and so thinking about how different, how to, how do you do administer hiring processes And so in a place where it can be so diverse in terms of what the supply of teachers looks like, that might really affect what you do.

Um, and uh, then, um, so I started to get sort of interested in issues of sort of addressing, you know, teacher labor market things generally, and thinking about how do schools make sure they have enough people to select from when they're hiring so that they're getting the, the candidates that they want.

And so that's where I started to get interested in their issues like compensation and teacher licensure, um, and things like that. And then, you know, coming to Illinois, it turned out, um, Illinois had some of the best data, uh, publicly available data on school staff vacancies, um, in the country that I started to sort of look into.

Um, and then, uh, so I'd started to look at sort of issues of teacher shortages in Illinois. Um, and then I'd also made some connections to my co-authors on, um, another paper, um, that I think the one you were originally interested in, and that I think you, you covered in a, in a previous episode very, uh, very effectively.

Um, you know, uh, the, the lead author on that paper, um, is Twan a friend of mine now. Um, and he and I had become, um, friendly at a conference and he wanted to work together and I was excited to work with him. And we had similar interests on teacher shortages and he was interested in maybe something a little broader than Illinois.

Um, and so, uh, he invited me to, to collaborate with him on that. And then it turns out it's also a, you know, it, it, some, some, sometimes things like this tend to spiral. Uh, and so, um, once I had started to dig into the Illinois data and, you know, working on the national, um, paper, um, then people also wanted to sort of have conversations about it and talk about it.

And that's sort of one thing led to another. And now it's a, a big chunk of, um, of my time. But that was a long answer, but was it an effective answer? Did I answer the question? You did and I loved it because it reminds me maybe a little less, um, formal, but it reminds me a lot of the process by which this podcast got started.

Like it was informal conversations between Amanda and I of just like connecting dots, you know, and putting together pieces of our experience and pieces of my scholarship when I was getting my admin credential and Master's of ed leadership and. Noticing what was missing. And then I think also we're gonna get to this in a bit, but like I was frustrated with the way the press was covering the shortage crisis too.

Like I felt like it was super cursory and lacking in nuance and I just kept waiting for the coverage to get better and it never did. So that's why we created this and that's why I was so excited to find your paper 'cause it is groundbreaking and I'm just so glad you're here. But before we talk about that, um, I came across some, some phrasing in your writings 'cause I've read some of your other things now, which I had to giggle Paul because you referred to K 12 as counterintuitive and that is like the scholarly kind version of what I say, which is that it's bizarro.

Can you explain what you mean by that? Um, just a little bit. Yeah, I think there are a couple of, at least a couple of things that make, um, like K 12 public education, just really hard for people to think about, myself included. Um, one is, I think it's just a sheer size, uh, like I think the size of the, you know, American public education system is so big that I think it's very hard for people to get their heads around and it creates a lot of situations where if you ask about anything, the extent to which anything is happening and you just count up the raw number of times that it's happening in American public education, it's always gonna be a huge number.

Um, and that like makes it very hard for people to like, get their heads around, like, what are the bigger numbers? What are the, you know, it's just like there's so much of it and so many people, um, touch it in various ways, whether they're working in schools or have kids in schools or whatever it is that the scope of it, I think is beyond what people are used to navigating and I think that makes it really hard for people to think about.

The other thing I think is very counterintuitive about it is I think we tend to talk about it, um, as a single. There, there is a public education system. And in a sense that's, in a sense that's correct. But in another sense, you know, we've got, I don't know what the number is now 'cause it changes, but I wanna say something along the lines of 13,000 local school districts that all have some degree of autonomy.

Um, and to the extent that they don't have autonomy, it's often because they're controlled at the state level, not the federal level. Um, and so I think it's, you know, people talk about what is education like, or what is happening in education, and I think it's natural to talk about it that way, but in reality it does, it kind of doesn't make any sense because there's so much diversity, um, in terms of, you know, gi you know, from place to place, uh, about, you know, just what is going on that I think, and, but that's very hard to have a conversation about that.

Um, and so I think that this, the size of it and the diversity of it and the local control of it make it all very hard for people to talk about and to, to think about. And I think that shows up in a lot of educational conversations. Oh my gosh, I couldn't have said it better myself. That was what we started getting feedback on about just trying to describe teacher pay for example.

It is so different from district to district, state to state that, I mean, for example, in the teacher preparation process, Jess was like, I think you're speaking another language. I don't know these terms and phrases that you're using. And I think people are confused by the fact that there is a US Department of Ed and there are, um, state departments of ed and it seems like maybe they have a lot of power and control over what we do and they.

Just don't, it's really, I, I'm gonna say, and you push back and tell me if I'm wrong, that really school boards have the most power over what is going on in a district and that they don't necessarily have any experience teaching. And I think that's why so much of what is done in K 12 can be counterintuitive.

AKA bizarro is because non-experts get to lead our profession. And it's so weird. What do you think? Yeah, I, yeah, I think, I think there's something too. I think it probably depends exactly what aspects of schooling we're talking about. I think school boards are definitely, I think, underrated to some extent in terms of how much power they have.

And I think that they're, they're not the ones who tend to get attention. Right. I think the political attention tends to focus probably disproportionately on the federal government, uh, which is playing a relatively small role, or like individual teachers, um mm-hmm. You know, and what individual teachers are doing or aren't doing or something like that.

Um. I think you're right that the school boards especially are making a lot of the decisions and are legally entitled to make a lot of the decisions, but are often not the subjective as much attention as would be justified. Well, I could talk about the convoluted ways in which K 12 is governed and siloed all day, but we're gonna move on.

I wanna get to, before you start talking about your findings and the limitations of the data, which that latter piece, I think is the richer conversation. Um, before we do that, I just kind of wanna ask you to unpack your issues with the term shortage and crisis. And I think it's funny and interesting because that's the name of our podcast, and you have a very eloquent, nuanced take on this term shortage and on crisis.

Can you unpack that a little bit and maybe even talk about your frustration with the way it's been covered in the press? Yeah. Um, I think, uh, you know, I'm, you know, in full transparency, I think it, it, I'm often, uh, I often give a lot of, uh, like journalists included a hard time about using some of this language.

So I think it is only fair that I be able to explain a little bit about what my concerns are. I think. So I think I have a couple of concerns about, uh, different aspects of the language or framing. Um, even though I think there's also a lot there that's worth, um, paying attention to. I mean, one thing is, I think we talk about teachers, um, but in reality there's actually several different types of teachers that are actually in pretty distinct labor markets.

And by which I mean they either. A lot of teachers are either not willing or not allowed to teach in different places or in different subjects than they are either because they won't cross state lines or their certification requires them to teach certain things. And so in reality, we have, you know, there are elementary teachers and there are math teachers, and there are social studies teachers, and there are special education teachers, and there's teachers in California and teachers in Illinois.

And, um, so one thing is, I think, you know, sort of as I was saying before about how the size and diversity of our education system, I, I, I get a little worried when we generalize and lump all of those different things together and call them, well they're teachers, um, particularly as someone who like, you know, as a middle school teacher.

I think of my job is almost completely different than the job of an elementary tea school teacher, which as far as I'm concerned, I would never be able to do, uh, no matter how much preparation I received. Uh, and so I think lumping, I think of, you know, the idea of lumping me in with the idea of an elementary school.

You know, being a middle school science teacher in elementary teacher is fundamentally the same kind of job. I always found sort of a little bit counterintuitive, and I think that matters potentially for what we think we need to do to fix the shortage problems. Um, you know, because I think it helps to have targeted solutions to targeted problems.

Um, so I think that's, that's part of it, um, as sort of lumping all teachers together. Another piece I think is, um, uh, being a little bit hard to define and clarify what we mean by shortage. I think the word shortage, I think is a little bit hard to get our heads around. I think it's absolutely true in some sense that we have a teacher shortage.

I think that you can absolutely define those terms in such a way that it's a hundred percent true that there is a teacher shortage. I think, um, at the same time, I think the framing around this tends to obscure a lot of important facts about education. Like, for example, the fact that right now there are more teachers in, um, per in public schools, uh, than I think at any point in American history and more teachers per student than at any point in history.

And maybe that's a good thing and maybe we want there to be even more teachers. But I do think that for a lot of listeners and for a lot of policy makers who hear some of that narrative like in the media, I, I don't know that they necessarily understand that when people say there's a teacher shortage that could be happening even as the number of teachers in the schools is going up.

Um, and the number of students going down, which is the situation schools have been in for the last couple of years on average. Um, and I think, um, again, I think that also has some, I don't just need to be nitpicky about the, the rhetoric. I think it potentially matters for what people think the implications are for all.

Whether, um, uh, exactly, um, like whether we should be thinking differently about the choices we have, whether about, about hiring more teachers versus paying teachers more, for example. Uh, like, I don't know that that's as in intuitive. I think that's an, an option we should be considering more. And I don't know that the teacher shortage framing lends itself to that, um, necessarily.

Um, and the, and in terms of the crisis language, I think one concern, I have a couple of concerns there. One is I think it's a little bit hard and I, I think something I we might return to is, I think it's actually a little bit hard to say what the actual effects on kids are of some of the shortages. In part that's, 'cause there might be more shortages, but also more teachers working in schools.

Um, and we don't know what, what, so exactly what kinds of impacts there are. And I worry about giving people a. False sense of exactly how terrible it is in public schools right now. And I worry a little bit about both using crisis language in a way that discourages people from becoming teachers because we frame it as such a terrible job, nobody wants to do it.

Um, or we play into narratives about what a terrible place public schools are to send your children. Um, and I think there are concerted, I would describe them as concerted political efforts, uh, in some, some circles to undermine confidence in public schools. And I'm not sure that that crisis language isn't playing into their hands to some extent.

Um, so again, that was a bit of a bit of a long answer. Um, but that's sort of my, my general thought thoughts about why some of the framing might matter here. Thank you for that response. I think when I was covering your article and I just sort of asked AI after I've already read your article and I sort of juxtaposed AI with what we actually know.

Um, it makes it seem like AI makes it seem like, and these quick Google returns that people get. Without reading the real data make it seem like it's easily quantifiable and it mischaracterizes the whole thing completely. But I mean, I think when you say like we have the more teachers now than we've ever had, and then you juxtapose that with the experience of teachers scrambling, having to give up their preps because there's not enough subs scrambling to cover teachers' vacancies.

That, I mean, that's what we did. There was vacan, the vacancies were so bad at a school I once taught at that the teachers had to take turns giving up their prep to cover a vacant room with no teacher of record. And then we talk about two, the sort of the undervalue of. First and second grade teachers and administrators not understanding how esoteric and nuanced reading instruction is and how long it takes to become a quality reading instructor.

Um, and that you can't learn that in a credentialed program. You have to learn that on the job. And so when you put like just a ton of brand new teachers that keep turning over in these high needs districts, what we wind up with is a reading opportunity gap. So I think, I mean, I know what you're saying is true, but it's so interesting that, uh, what we are experiencing on the ground floor feels like such a panic mode of lack of teachers.

Um, but anyways, thank you for clarifying. And when we talk about your, you made some qualitative categories to sort of discern what we mean by shortage and I think that's where we're gonna get into why that term shortage is sort of a misnomer. Okay. So have you ever, before we talk about your methodology, 'cause I'm super fascinated to hear you unpack that.

It was really cool. Have you, uh, have you ever done research on how this has impacted student learning or on teacher burnout? Is that an area that you've had a chance to look at? I personally, um, have not. Uh, so, uh, and I think, you know, and actually if I, it turns out that's become a thing where, uh, based on reviewer feedback in a lot of my own papers, I have to come to at the end and say, oh, you know, for all this discussion about, um, you know, uh, teacher vacancies and teacher shortages, uh, it's true.

I actually can't point directly to, uh, a clear story or clear evidence about exactly what impacts that has on, on teachers and students over and above the working conditions that might give rise to those shortages, uh, in the first place. Yeah. Thank you for that. So I think when we look at where the lack of equality better in teachers are, uh, it's not where, maybe where you think like specifically in the first and second grade classrooms, which again, I've never taught in there either, but, okay.

So. Let's get into your methodology. So you started to dig in, you had wan's help, he's a data analyst. Yeah. Is that his role? Yeah. Juan and Chan are both, you know, both my co-authors here. They, uh, and, and to be clear on the data collection, I, I, I wanna make it clear that a, you know, most of the effort was, was there, uh, I, I, there, there's a reason I'm number three on this paper.

Okay. Well, you can still tell us about all their good work and, and sell them on this podcast. So you guys started to get to work. I'm so interested in hearing about how you began to peel back the layers of this onion and like what that felt like for you. Talk away about that. Yeah, so, you know, I think.

You know, for, for us to some extent, I think we, you know, it was, um, there's a broad, it was a broad understanding. I think that these are topics that are of interest to people. Um, you know, particularly, you know, it's almost every year, uh, you know, late summer you get a spike in stories about, uh, teacher shortage issues and things.

And, um, and, and you see this in education research conferences as well. Um, and I think that also concerned us that there was often people taking some things for granted, I think about what was going on, and not necessarily recognizing that if you actually dig into the data, the evidence about the, the scope of teacher shortages, their actual magnitude, um, was pretty scarce.

Um, and, you know, there had been some approaches in the past to sort of understanding these issues that we thought were interesting and had pushed the conversation forward. That, but were also limited in some ways, like people trying to create estimates. Of how many teachers would be required in the future and, um, how many teachers would be produced in the future.

And trying to estimate sort of overall shortage rates or trying to compare teacher licensure rates to teacher hiring rates to try to get a sense of what the, what shortages there might be. But us really feeling like this is, this is, these are all useful and important things, but we're all trying to deal with the problem that actually if you just go out into the world and ask how bad are the shortages?

There's no actual way to answer that question. Um, and so, you know, we, um, co I'll say I'll use, we very generously here, but mostly my co-authors, um, started to think about, okay, if we wanted to operationalize this, what would that look like? What would operationalizing it look like? And we, we ended up settling, and I think this is what you were referring to as a sort of, maybe it's the qualitative categories here about thinking like, well, is at least a couple of ways to think about it.

One is how many positions are vacant in schools? So, which we mean roughly to be. Positions where, uh, administrators are still actively at any, at a given moment, actively trying to fill them still that there should, there's a position and eh, it, now there's a little fuzziness here 'cause is there someone in that position and temporarily and you're trying to replace them?

Is there no one in that position that, that's a little, still a little bit of fuzziness there, but we thought, okay, vacancies as an actual position you were trying to fill and it is not filled, uh, on a permanent basis as one sort of way of thinking about it. And then also thinking about, okay, well, um, what about the rate at which, um, teachers are not fully licensed for the positions that they're teaching as another sign?

And that one's something that has been used more commonly in the past as a kind of measure of shortages is saying, what are, uh, how many teachers do you have? But it looks like they're not fully licensed. And that might be an indication that you were not able to find. Someone who is fully licensed to fill that position.

Um, and so then trying to figure out, okay, can we actually, are there good counts? Can we find on a state by state basis what the counts here are? Um, and trying to do then system combine a variety of sort of systematic search approaches to search news stories, to search public reports by state education agencies and so on, to try to say, okay, if these are, we'd like these two numbers from every state.

How many open positions are there that are still, you know, vacant? How many teachers are not fully licensed for their positions? Can we go state by state, pull every data source we can think of and in, and in, and, um, correspond with the state. Education is about this. Um, can, what can we, what's the best we can get for each state, for those, um, for those numbers?

Um, and that, that, that essentially describes the, the project. I mean, one thing that really I'm struck by is, you know, in, in our state of California, um, our governor, Gavin Newsom has been like, okay, everybody, what's going on? Why we have this problem? And so he sort of asked the CTC to begin to research it.

And I say like, don't ask the CTC, they don't know, and they're driving us out of the profession if you ask me. But, um, I think it, I don't understand, and it would behoove our leaders to be like, what are the numbers? And then realizing we don't have those numbers, and then coming up with a process by which we can be reporting this accurately and come up with a common language.

Um, so did, did you, were you struck by the fact that it's just not well known? Were you just like overwhelmed? Like what, how can this be. Uh, I, I, I appreciate that question and maybe I was just already so used to, you know, from a research, from a researcher standpoint, most of my life is being frustrated by how I can't get exactly the data I would like.

So my expectations might have been a little bit lower than your expectations, but I understand why that might be where they were, you know, one thi So yes, certainly, and I think this is in a lot of ways from my point of view, one of the main takeaways of our paper is just about how limited the data are.

Something I will say in states defense, uh, I'm not saying I like the state of affairs, but I think something that I think makes it a little bit more understandable is, um, states do a lot of data collection work, and most of the things that they are interested in that are easiest to collect and that they're accountable for collecting, have to do with the people who work in the system.

And when we talk about shortages in some sense, we're talking about people who are not in the system. Um, we're asking questions about, um. You know, people you have not been able to hire. Uh, whereas if, you know, a lot of states, for example, are required, um, or have been required to in keep track of who is fully licensed for their position.

Do you have, like, for example, highly qualified teachers is often the language that gets used and that's, there are sort of regulations that say we need to document how many of your teachers are, you know, highly qualified for the position they're assigned to teach. Are they teaching out of subject area and so on.

That is things states have been required to collect. And those are people by definition who are working in the school system. They're public employees. If we're talking about open or vacant. And, and actually I would say, I think states on the whole have much better data about that question because the data about the licenses the state is issuing and the people who work in the school system, uh, and there are rules that say you need to know, uh, about who those people are and what their licenses are.

On the other hand, if we talk about a vacancy. We're talking about people who are not working in the system. We're talking about places where ideally you'd ultimately like to get somebody. Um, and so I think, you know, if there hasn't, there's no specific people to be keeping track of in that case. And there's no, um, law that says you need to be keeping track of it.

Um, and so I think there just hasn't been a lot of impetus for that. And, and again, to be honest, I, and again, I'll, I'll put aside my researcher hat here and say I understand that we already ask schools to collect a lot of data, and that it's very easy for me as a researcher to say, well, how come you're not collecting this data also?

Uh, but it, that's also essentially a request that they do more work. Um, and I think that work might be worth it, but I, I, I do understand why it hasn't just sort of, um, spontaneously arisen, um, from the ground up. I also think that like our leaders, the ones who are being called up account, like governors at that level don't understand what local control means and how it's interfering with, um, our ability to quantify the data more clearly.

I just think there's a ignorance about K 12 governance and a lot of things, like you say, people suppose and assume that aren't just not the case. Right. But I also, I also wanna get back to this idea of, um, these qualitative categories. One of which is, I think you described it, correct me if I'm wrong, of hiring somebody who's just beginning their credential pathway.

Right. And then like a qualitative, I think there was a category in which you describe hiring someone on an emergency permit who's not even on that pathway yet. And then for, I just wanted to like share with my personal example and what I've seen in these highly impacted districts is when teachers are hired who are just on the beginning of their credential pathway, the impact on that is it kind of like ripples in a pond because you don't have time to reflect on your practice and you're working and going to school at night and you're also paying a lot of money for specialized programs that let you do that.

Like there's no state schools that let you do that. You have to go to a private school. At least that's been my experience and you wind up not delivering the best education and nobody's really like standing in those spaces noticing this. And so year over year, a lot of kids are getting brand new teachers who are not only just brand new, but they're like what I was doing, which is going through all of this arduous coursework and really just.

Constantly reacting and not being able to reflect. But on the other side, I wanna honor something that you've mentioned in your writings, that teacher preparation and teacher exams, all of this, that completion of all of this stuff is not a good predictor of efficacy. And you cited another paper in your research and I'm sorry I didn't write that down.

So can you comment on those two sides of the continuum of, um, hiring teachers that are not prepared? I think especially like hiring somebody who already has a credential, but outside of their field, like I think that is not a shortage issue. I think those pe I think we need to be more expansive in what a credential allows you to do.

But I'll let you comment. No, I think you laid out the issues there. Really nicely. And I think that's, um, that, that that potential tension or that those potential trade offs, I think are often a lot of what's missing in a lot of this conversation. I think, I think there are some for, I think there are some people for whom a credential and a credential in the specific thing you are licensed to teach is a clear and important indicator of whether you should be teaching it.

I, as you mentioned, I, I do not think that the evidence supports that, and I would say that my experience does not support that. I think, uh, I wouldn't say that those things don't matter at all. But I would also say that, um, even in my experience, you know, I worked with folks who were not fully certified or who were getting their, like just beginning get their credential pathway on some sort of temporary certification.

And some of them were definitely, definitely, like you said, sort of spread very thin. And I think it was clear on the other hand, I, I would've killed to be as good as some of them were, uh, at what they were doing. Um, and I get particularly nervous when. Um, people paint with a very broad brush about how good those teachers are, including teachers I knew personally just because of the documentation that they hold or don't hold.

And I think some of the rhetoric around that has gotten way overblown gone well out beyond what the evidence suggests, but I certainly would, but I certainly understand at the same time why one people would look at the overall numbers of teachers on emergency permits or some sort of, um, you know, inadequate qu uh, certification and say, oh, that on the, in the aggregate, that looks like there's some problems there and why you might also be worried about, um, whether that reflects on average a somewhat, you know, less effective teacher workforce than you might otherwise have.

I will say in particular, I think something that. Is particularly concerning. And where I'm more convinced that some of those temporary certifications are a problem is that they tend to be associated with higher turnover, not necessarily less effective teachers in the sense that the students aren't learning as much, but they are more likely to leave in a lot of cases.

I'm not sure that that's always true. And I also, you know, I think in a lot of cases now, a lot of those programs are actually school districts doing really interesting and potentially promising things to like grow their own teacher workforce. And in a lot of cases, I think that might look like their teachers are not fully certified.

And maybe that's concerning. But on the other hand, they also might be people who are really strong connections to the school and the students and the community. So again, I don't wanna paint with too broad a brush, but I, I do think that's the place where I also worry about some of the certification numbers.

But that's a long way of saying that. I think fundamentally you're correct, um, that it's not entirely obvious what to think when you see that someone is teaching in a position with a certification that is technically in some sense, not up to the, the state standards. So did you said that we have more teachers in America than we ever have in the history of our public education.

And I wonder if that might be, uh, impacted by districts hiring teachers in like the Philippines or like we, we have colleagues who work in, in, and like Jess was saying, her district hires a lot of teachers in the Philippines. And I, I don't know if that, if any of that, if you've run into any information about that and, and like, 'cause it looks like we have enough teachers because all these teachers are from overseas and Yeah.

Curious. Yeah. Yeah. So, and when I am, um, and to be clear, when I say that there are more teachers I'm including, uh, wherever they're coming from, if you just ask, you know, full-time equivalent, how many, how many people are in roles, uh, classified as teachers in schools that's as high, uh, or higher than it has ever been in most places.

Uh, and I, in the, on the whole, I'm mostly talking about add 'em all up across the country. And, um, what do you get? Um, I, I, you know, as for what's enough, I think that's hard to say. And, you know, I think something that makes this tricky is that, um, a lot of those people are in teaching roles. I think they're less, they're often, I think in roles that don't necessarily, um, result in the kind of things you might expect.

So, for example, they don't necess, I don't think class sizes have gone down as much as you would expect from the increased teacher to student ratio, for example, because I think a disproportionate share that hiring is into either. Non-classroom instructional roles, sort of like, there are people who are like teachers on special assignment, for example, I think is the language that gets used a lot, which technically shows up in the data in most places as a teacher.

But they're, it's not like they're running a classroom. They're, uh, uh, or they're in like special education positions have become, you know, it's more and more students are diagnosed with disabilities, then you get more and more te you need more and more teachers in special education roles and that doesn't necessarily reduce class sizes.

So, uh, so just on the, on the question of like, sort of, is it enough, I think that's, I, I'm not prepared to say here what the, what would be enough teachers, um, and what the right number is, but I do think that's something that I think is a, I think as partially explains people's surprise about this, is they say, look, my experience as a teacher or teachers generally is not that, you know, by, you know, we've, if we double the number of teachers, we half our workloads, for example, or our classes shrink by that, by that much.

I think that's in part because. Uh, the roles that these teachers are taking on are not necessarily strictly classroom teacher roles. Um, uh, did, did that make sense? Yeah. I guess I'm just wondering if the reason we have so many teachers is because we're hiring them overseas, like that they're coming in from other countries because, uh, tenure.

And also I was wondering about like, is there, are there numbers or any research that you've come across of teachers who are veteran teachers who are tenured teachers who are leaving? Because I feel like that's something else that's happening, like a trend that, that I feel like we're seeing, um, too, so yeah, this is just a very complex topic.

Hence the many, many thematic episodes in our podcast. Um, this, when you were talking about, like, I, I, I definitely think Amanda's point is, is, is crucial because of the, when, when we were talking about. Warm bodies in a classroom, where is the nuance of understanding the loss of a veteran teacher? And like I, I see that in the high needs districts that are more impacted.

They have highly front loaded their salary packages in those first five years of step and column. And so there's no incentive to stay by like year five or so. You have to bolt so that you don't, don't have so many years that they won't take them in a nearby district. And I'm talking about the district that you and I both taught in.

They have a serious problem of a lack of veteran teachers. And so they're constantly trying to mitigate that problem by buying dense, pedagogically dense canned curriculums. So it's like, it's a very new, it's a very nuanced problem. I'll let you respond to that. And then I wanna come back to the credential coursework issue.

I think, um, so, uh, um, a couple of things. So just one, I'd say, I think it's thinking about the, um, hiring teachers from other countries, for example. I think as more broadly I'd say. I think that's something where we don't have a, like super clear, um, data on the magnitude of that. I do get the sense that it's more common than it used to be, and I, but I think it's a more, I think it's an example of a, the broad, a broader question of, um, you know, it, it's related to the question about licensure and credentialing, which is yes, we're able to hire more people, um.

Are we increasingly having to get more and more desperate in some sense to fill those roles? I think that's something that'll be interesting to see in the coming years. One thing I think has been particularly relevant in recent years is that schools have been increasing their staffing levels at the same time as the economy has been.

Uh, and the, the labor market in general has been been very, very tight. By which I mean unemployment rates have been very, very low. Uh, and, um, vacancy rates in all sectors have been pretty high. And so it, for anyone, uh, who has wanted to hire people recently, uh, it's been actually really hard to hire people, uh, which is great for workers, um, but also means schools are in a position where if they're trying to hire people, they're competing with a lot.

It, it's, it's tough. And so I think there maybe I'd be curious to see what happens in the next few years. As the economy cools off a bit and as schools, um, budgets shrink a bit as federal pandemic aid dries up a bit, I do wonder what that's gonna look like in terms of whether it's hiring, uh, you know, under certified teachers or whether it's hiring teachers internationally.

I, I'm not entirely sure how that will evolve in them in the coming years. And like also too, the low birth rate of my generation, gen X, there just weren't as many people born. I don't know how old you are, Paul, but I just turned 50 and there was just a low birth rate of people who were entering their prime working years.

Um, and then a large birth rate of children that were having to educate. It's just like a supply and demand situation. And then juxtapose that with the growing income inequality and the increase of essential things like housing, healthcare, education, making their profession no longer look attractive. Did you hear about the gender gap and um, gender pay gap growing?

They just announced it recently. So the first time in 20 years, the gender pay pay gap has increased. Controlling for inflation. Male incomes rose 3.5% and females raised uh, only 1.5% and they cited two professions as the culprits of stagnating wages, not keeping up with inflation. One was nursing and you know, the other one was teaching.

I mean, we just can't afford the things the teachers used to be able to pay. They used to be able to buy a house. They used to be able to put their kids through college. They can't do those things anymore. Yeah. Um, but when you were talking about the teacher preparation and coursework stuff, I mean, you were saying how it's a poor predictor.

I, I think, and you don't have to say this 'cause I know you have higher ups and I don't, I'm tenure K 12 teacher. I just don't think that stuff is all that useful. I think it's just onerous and ridiculous. Like, I do think we should be asked to do some preparation, but I don't think what we're doing, especially in California, oh my gosh, it's not helpful.

So, of course, if you're, and like you were saying, way overstating the case of they've done all these things, they're highly qualified. No, no, no, no. It's all superficial and ridiculous. Right? Like how mu how much are you willing to say about that? I, I, first, can I ask a follow up on, you mentioned things in California, specif specifically.

Are there specific, um, requirements of teachers that you feel like are particularly egregious? Yeah. Induction. Induction is a postgraduate. Requirement of two additional years that teachers actually in Los Angeles have to pay for. In my district, I didn't have to pay for it, but if I couldn't, there was an option to pay for it.

And so if you do pay for it, those units get added to step and column and I could not have for them, and so they didn't get added to my step and columns. You get paid more for having more money and being married to a wealthy spouse or having generational wealth induction is not helpful. The Cal TPAs are not helpful, and now administrators have to do the Cal APAs.

Not helpful. Administrator induction not helpful in other states. They don't have to. Do you know what these are Paul, I'm sorry. I'm using these terms like, you know, but I don't know that, you know, I I I, I know some of them and for the rest I think I, I can get the, the gist. Um, so I think I'm, I think I'm, I'm, I'm with you, uh, in general in terms of, um, what you're talking about.

Mm-hmm. Um, you know, I, um, so I think, uh, I think these are very relevant things to be talking about in a conversation about teacher shortages just as framing. I think if for anyone who is concerned of, for any reason about there being shortages of teachers or you even mentioned administrators to some extent.

Mm-hmm. Um, I, I, you absolutely have to at least reflect on the question of how hard do we make it to even be allowed to do the job. Amen. Amen. Um, and, uh, and I think so, so I think those are important questions to ask and, um, I will say. Uh, I think it is. I, I think the research on this is relatively clear on most of these things, that on average these things are not making a very big difference.

I have not done a careful cost benefit analysis, but my suspicion is that a lot of these activities, these, um, both, um, both, um, pre-service and in-service activities on average, I, I would not be surprised at all if they were not passing a cost benefit test. And like we've discussed, they are not a parti.

They might in some cases be a little bit predictive, but they're not on the whole, all that useful for identifying who is gonna be successful and not. Now I do wanna say, you know, in the defense of some of these things we talk like induction. I would say if you look at the evidence on the very best induction programs, there's plausible evidence that they are helping teachers, um, modestly, non trivially, not amazingly, but that they are helping with retention and effectiveness.

I don't, I, but at the same time, I don't think we should judge these programs based on what the very best programs do. I think, um, at least as a policy person, um, I think we might wanna learn from the very best programs, but we don't design policy around the assumption that only the best programs are implemented and they're implemented everywhere.

Um, and so I think, you know, we need to be thinking a lot more about whether the barriers that we put up. For people entering the profession are worth it, and whether they are fair to people in the profession. I think I'm also worried about some, I have some concerns about not just the pre-service, some of the pre-service requirements you mentioned, but also in service, the extent to which we require teachers to accumulate additional education Yeah.

In order to earn higher compensation. Mm-hmm. Um, I understand some of the rationale for that, and I'm not super confident that it's not a reasonable approach in a lot of cases, but I do think it's striking the extent to which, you know, there, um, to get a higher salary, you need more education. And it doesn't particularly matter in a lot of cases what you do to get that education.

Um, that suggests to me that we're not necessarily paying enough attention to whether those things are really worth it or whether that we're just making teachers jump through hoops. That's it. Um, to get extra pay. I, I, I think it is not at all obvious, um, that we've struck the right balance. There's.

That's it. And they're not, the units you can take, don't have to be towards a master's degree that gives you like self possession and agency to be a leader in the profession. It's just jumping through hoops to grab units and there's no like attention to nuance or authenticity of the education. And there are people just making money off of teachers 'cause teachers have to pay for those units.

Um, which is unusual in a credential, well, I shouldn't say it's unusual. There are other credential professions where they have to pay for their own certifications, but those classes are just not very helpful a lot of times. Yeah. And I say this as someone, and to be clear, I, you know, I'm saying this to someone who teaches in endorsement programs, in my case for administrators, but it's something that I take very seriously, which is that, um, you know.

My students in a lot of cases have to go through a program mm-hmm. Like mine. And I think there's a real onus on me and any instructor in these programs to make sure that their time is as valuable as possible and that they're learning things as much as possible and that we're not making their lives even harder for no reason.

And I, you know, I don't know that as a field we've done enough to reflect critically on that, but I do think it's something that weighs on me, um, and that we should be thinking more about as a, as a profession. You're one of the good ones, Paul. Oh, thank you for saying, I will say I thought my ed leadership program was, was, was very useful and I thought there was a lot of good stuff in there.

I don't think it was complete. And I do have other criticisms, but it was a very different experience than some other professional development, which is not connected to a master's, you know, so. Let's talk about your findings and in in particular these three categories of levels of data availability that you had to sort of discern because it was so overwhelming.

Paul, like I've always said, this is not a political issue. I mean, I guess it is to some extent, but the lack of reporting red, blue, and purple states, it was so amazing. So describe your categories and your findings. Yeah, so, um, the categories. So we end up, um, breaking states up, uh, into, you know, we try to classify them based on, um, how much data we're able to find, um, about, uh, so remember we're interested in, um, teacher licensure rates and then teacher vacancy, uh, numbers.

Um, and so we break, you know, states up into, you know, states where we can find that information in a relatively, you know, recent plausible, comprehensive way. Um, states where it's somewhat less clear, maybe we can get some information, uh, and states where we would describe the, the information we were looking for is not, uh, accessible.

Um, and we sort of assume, if not accessible to us, it's not, we've tried pretty hard, uh, and then it would be hard for anyone to get, I forget exactly the language we used around those, but we try to sort of put. States into, um, categories or tiers that way. So, okay. So your first category was states where you had pretty reliable data sources, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I think we described it as recent and clear. You know, this was another challenge for us, right? Is what to do in a case where we could find some information, but it came from a report from a few years ago, for example. Um, and that being a case where, you know, it's, it's not obvious how to interpret that information or how quickly it can go outta date, right?

Particularly thinking about doing this, you know, beginning this project relatively early in the pandemic and thinking about how rapidly the worlds can change, uh, you know, how do we handle that, that problem. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then the middle category, how would you describe that middle, because most of the states fell into this middle category.

Is this where you had to use news sources and not actual sources, like basically secondhand information? Is that the middle category? Um, I, I believe there were a few things that could get states into that sort of fuzzy category where we could get some information, but for example, it might not be about the entire state.

So we might not be comfortable, for example, that the entire state was represented or there could be some potentially conflicting information Mm. Across, uh, sources. So I don't think that was the only reason, um, uh, they could end up in that sort of indeterminate category. And then the bottom category, which is the entire west coast and the state sort of sprinkled all over the place from every political stripe those states.

I wanna know, were you surprised that so many states fell into those categories? Which specific states fell into those categories? Yeah, because it's just bizarre. I think it's really weird, the variety of states in that bottom category. Um. You know, I don't know what I, you know, it's, it's too hard in retrospect to say, what would I have predicted?

I don't know that I had clear expectations. And if I did, I don't know that I would remember them, uh, correctly. Now, in retrospect, um, I do think it's, uh, certainly interesting to me looking back how little rhyme or reason. There was, in terms of, you know, what, what are those states gonna be where we can't find any information about vacancies?

I think you're right. I think, uh, you know, it certainly it's on the one hand, yes, it's basically the west coast, uh, you know, California up through, uh, Alaska, I think. Uh, and uh, but on the other hand, um, you know, we've got states in the Midwest, uh, we've got red states and blue states. Um, we've got states on the East coast and, uh, or at least, um, at least in New England, I don't know if they like to be, I don't know how to classify that exactly.

Um, but I think so I think, um, and you know, I think that speaks a little bit to some of the, what can, maybe that speaks a little bit to some, what can sometimes be the sort of, um, uh, surprising politics of education and the way, you know, I don't know that the, but also I think it's just that, again, these are data, vacancy data or data that in general states are not using, the federal government is generally not requiring be collected.

Um. So I think you end up, uh, with, uh, sometimes a, a little bit of a, a little bit of randomness around, um, where the, uh, the data are or are not collected. Um, so I don't know. Yeah, I think it, it sounds like, uh, you were as struck by as we were by how kind of all over the place the data were. I was so struck by it, and I guess.

I was more idealistic. I expected my state to be better than that, mainly because of Gavin Newsom's, like very public declaration that he cares about the problem. But then I was like, of course it's this way. Of course it's this way because of the problem of local control. And when you even try to describe the problems in K 12 because it's so esoteric to people, they're like, wait, what?

Like it local control means that school districts have a lot of power over the ways our schools are governed from choosing curriculums to hiring the superintendent. Like they just have a lot of power. And what I found so striking in, in how you guys chose to write this up was you got to the meat of it, you're like.

The way they describe a vacancy, the way they report, like who they report to, like what they consider as a vacancy and all of these other issues around, sometimes principals wanna hire someone straight out of, you know, barely getting onto the credential pathway because it's cheaper, because of step and column.

It winds up being a lot cheaper to hire brand new people. So it's just very confusing. And how would you describe, if you had to sum it up, how local control impacts the limitations of your data? Um, so I think one of the, I think part of the way you see local control affecting things is we have a lot more complete data around teacher certification and, um, whether they're fully certified, uh, in fact, I, I am not sure about this, but I think maybe it might be every state or almost every state where we were able to get something, um, about teacher certification, um, rates.

Um, and I think. But I think that reflects in part, is that is a place where the local control has been greatly reduced. Um, that's a place where, you know, states and the federal government in various ways have come in and said, oh no, actually you need to keep track of what licenses are held by people with each assignment and, um, whether those licenses are aligned with those assignments.

Uh, whereas on the vacancy side of things, um, that's a place where school districts are left to their own devices. Um, they, uh. Actually probably do have some, most of them are probably are aware of the fact that there are vacancies they need filling, right? They've got job boards, for example. They're actually trying to hire for those positions.

But the way they document it, um, is much more all over the place because of that local control that you said that there's no one coming in and imposing a definition or imposing a collection requirement. Um, and so in some cases they might be collecting some things. In other cases, um, they're not. Yeah, I mean, the depths of the lack of accountability was something I was primed to see because of me digging into really the coverup, I'm calling it a coverup of our national illiteracy problem.

And then also the lack of implementation of Title IX and K 12. So like these very foundational things, which I thought should be taken care of. Nobody even agreed that we had a problem. We, we had no common language to describe these problems. So, and I knew that was coming from local control. So local control means that we don't have a common set of vocabulary terms or priorities to get into digging into this problem.

So I guess what I, where I wanna end is I would like for you to talk about. What you think needs to happen going forward. Do you agree with us that a national professional association would help sort of standardize the way in which we talk about this and, you know, give us a common language? Do you, what do you think contributes to the shortage even maybe, and like, who needs to see your data?

'cause I don't think people have seen it enough. I think it's get, it gets quoted by other people and taken out of context, and then people think they know what you've said and they don't really know. So I'll let you comment on all that. It's, uh, you, you've, uh, characterized my experiences, uh, very well. Uh, I think, um, this is one of those things where I think, you know, people have narratives, uh, that they are already sort of, um.

Committed to a lot of times, and they interpret in good faith. I think they, um, interpret in a lot of cases the same information interpreted differently by different people depending on, um, sort of where they're coming at this from. Um, so I, I, I'll say a couple of things. I think you had a, a couple of questions there.

I'll start with the sort of, um, what might help address some, um, of these shortages. So, you know, from my point of view, I think the variation in shortages is, um, at least as big. Of an issue as the shortages in general. And what that means is essentially that these problems are localized in various ways.

Um, you know, I have students who can post a, a open position and get dozens or dozens or even, you know, a hundred applications for an open position. Uh, and I have students who, um, are struggling, will struggle to develop a position at all to get applicants period. Um, and I think recognizing that variation in their experiences, um, is important for understanding or what we would need to do about it.

And I think what we need are targeted solutions for targeted problems. So I think that, uh, in many cases, maybe it's 'cause I have a bit of a background in economics. I think that has to do with money. Um, and making sure that, um, schools, uh, that are, uh, that have a harder time staffing their positions, have more resources.

Yeah. So I think the data is important for policymakers to see. I think some policymakers are in tune with the fact that we don't necessarily have perfect data here, and that there is a lot of variation in shortages. And that's part of what we document in the paper. Um, nationwide is differences between states.

Um, that's part of what I document in Illinois is differences between school districts or even schools within school districts. And that understanding that variation, I think matters because I think my experience as policy makers think very differently about the problem, depending on whether they think of it as something that's affecting everybody the same way.

Or whether they think about it as affecting specific school districts, specific schools, specific classrooms, specific teaching positions. And the extent to which, uh, because I think, you know, for policymakers, if they think it's affecting everyone equally, they tend to, uh, propose solutions that are what I think of as, uh, more of the same.

Um, kind of we need to increase the rate at which people are going into teacher preparation programs, for example. And I'm not sure that that's the best use of our resources because there are some classrooms and some positions and some districts we're already very good at getting people into and pumping more people through those pipelines, I'm not convinced would help, for example.

But when I think when they are more aware of the kind of variation or the lack of information that we have about these things, the more they're inclined to say, okay, well let's collect the information and then let's use it to target the solutions where they're needed. Whe you know, whether that's creating new preparation programs that will serve, um, the position fill, the positions that we're not able to fill, or whether that means, um, funding that goes disproportionately to the schools and districts that have the most vacancies.

I'll just say, you know, just frankly that's how, what Illinois has done and I think part of the rationale in Illinois, um, for collecting. More administrative statewide vacancy data is to then be able to use that data to say, okay, well those are the districts that need help addressing shortages. Those are the positions where we need more teachers.

Now let's take the money and let's take the resources and let's take the energy and put it into filling those positions rather than trying to spread it in some generic way across the state. I suppose if, okay, so the, the idea you and I both have is differential pay, especially for sped, but, um, I think in bipoc communities that are highly impacted with the shortage, but if you think about it like this, you have to reframe and respect teacher, veteran teachers because we would put, it would attract veteran teachers if it had more pay.

And we could move our, our best talent, which is presumably veteran teachers, not always, but mo, move them into these other positions so they can be paid more. Because like right now, what teachers earn with their veteran status is the chiller vibe, right? I can take all AP classes, I can go to the districts that don't have climate and culture issues, and just kind of coast on into retirement because I'm not leaving anything.

No one expects me to lead anything, so I'm just gonna kind of show up and have an easier go of it because I've done my time in those harder settings to begin with. But then the other issue is, if. To look at why are those places not keeping and attracting talent and to try to fix those problems, which, which is what we do in the podcast.

We talk about why our profession is so unattractive at times and why specific places are in our field, or unattractive, which is really a civil rights nightmare because those students that need the best teachers because of historically marginalized insults to their learning, nothing, or just the very newest of us.

You know what I mean? What do you think about that? I think certainly what you're describing is born out in the research pretty clearly, which is that if the pay is the same, then the more, the more veteran teachers tend to move into the classrooms and the schools and the districts and the positions that they're gonna find more attractive.

And that often means, you know, they, they wanna work with the higher achieving kids or there's fewer disciplinary issues and things like that, and they have no incentive to do anything else. And so that gets shown up in the data. And that means, you know, the lower achieving kids, the kids who are marginalized the most are also getting the most novice teachers.

Now I, you know, I think I, I do probably tend to focus on compensation issues there. That's where I think the evidence is clearest about sort of what the interventions could be. But I think you're also right that there is also good evidence that things like working conditions and school leadership, which I sometimes lump in.

To the working conditions, um, bucket are really important for teachers, but that's a place where you all might have more to say than I do, because I think I would say in terms of their research evidence, that's a place where we have better evidence that those things matter for teachers over and above compensation.

The working conditions they have, the, the quality of their leaders are really important for things like retention. What, what we don't have are really reliable ways of. Intervening to improve those things. At least what I would, that's how I would characterize the research on this, um, uh, is that we know those things matter, uh, but we don't know.

For example, as someone who works in administrator preparation, it's very important to me to prepare the kinds of strong leaders that teachers say that they want to work in their schools. But I'm not always sure that I'm able to do that consistently and reliably. And I would love better evidence on things like, oh, how do you prepare school leaders to be the kinds of leaders that teachers want?

How do you organize working conditions in ways that will reliably make teachers happier and want to work in the profession generally, and especially in those schools and positions that are hardest to staff? I don't think site-based leadership is a humanizing position at all, Paul. I don't think that they have a job that is doable and manageable and humanizing and.

There's just too much pressure on them. I just think site-based leadership is just a really, really soul sucking job for a number of reasons that we talk about in the podcast. And that, you know, that is to say that like I have, I respect them. I didn't want that job. I looked at it and said, you know, no thanks.

But, um, I think that the way to fix this, the way to get the solutions into these schools and into these places where the teacher shortage problem is so, uh, pronounced, is to elevate teachers' leadership because we have firsthand knowledge of what's going on in these spaces. And we have solutions, but nobody asks our opinion.

I mean, I'm. Just going out on a limbal and inserting the central thesis of the podcast into this, into this, uh, interview, leadership, visionary innovation. These things are not curated in the minds of teachers. They're not. No one asks for their input. And so a lot of what gets done is very cursory. And what I say is ticking boxes by people who no longer have their fingers on the pulse of what's going on.

You know? So this whole idea of creating a space where if you are veteran and you want to do it, and you've met, whatever qualifications we decide you need to meet, you should be released from your teaching for part of your day to be in, in leadership. You shouldn't have to, I say you shouldn't have to lead, you shouldn't have to leave our profession to lead it.

So what are your thoughts about that? I know it's wacky, like it's so revolutionary, but like, that's what I'm saying. What do you think? I wouldn't say it's wacky at all. Uh, it certainly, you know, well beyond the scope of, uh, my expertise, uh, in terms of, you know, what kinds of benefits that would have or even how you would organize it to, to sort of make it effective.

But I think that might be certainly an interesting, I'd be curious, you know, are there people you could talk to even for your podcast? I wonder if there, you know, are there places in your experience that are trying more, uh, I don't know if shared governance is quite the right word, but, um, more of that, um, integrating the teacher, um, workforce and the administrative, uh, team in schools.

Is that something you're, uh, you've seen happen, uh, to any degree? No. I mean, we have toss, but they're not paid more. They just make whatever they have on step one column and they're basically implementers and so. I have found is that in places where we are doing a real cursory job of delivering quality education to the kids, um, and teachers develop self possession and have an opinion, they just kinda get shuffled around because their opinion complicates things like with ELD instruction, you know, sped instruction, climate and culture issues.

Um, and so the, the, it's an, you know, you're the annoying teacher in the room's, like, but like we're working on our LCAPs, you know what LCAPs are, they have. Okay. So I was on SSC, we're working on our LCAPs and one of the, wait, Trina, before you start saying a bunch of uh, acronyms, could you just explain what they are?

'cause you've just said like five acronyms and I think a lot of the people that li and whenever I re-listened to our episodes, I'm like, Trina, you used another acronym that people aren't really, maybe is so weird. And even Jess, who is our teacher, co-host in Nevada, doesn't know what we're talking about.

Okay. And sometimes I don't even know what you're talking about. What, what I mean because I mean, go through an administrative credential, like fine. What I mean to say is, is that administrators sit down and they come up with this plan to improve your school and, and in few areas like learning based outcomes, uh, climate and culture.

And they come up with these metrics to show their, how they're collecting their data and, and, and reflecting on it. And it's all just ticking boxes. Like one of the measures that we were supposed to be using to improve our reading levels was we were supposed to be all sitting down and reflecting on star reading data and none of us had been trained to use star reading data.

It was a new test we were using at the secondary level, and no one was being guided towards that process. Like it's all very superficial. And the extent to which that is like the problem here is I think probably jaw dropping to people. Yeah, I think, I don't, you know, I don't know. I think this is something where I'd be curious actually what, um, like what teachers want, like what kinds of roles they want in administration.

I think, uh, one, one question I have is sort of about even your experience of like, is the, are the types of roles, the leadership roles you're describing, are those things that, are those interests that teachers share widely? Like you think they're leaving 'cause their voice isn't heard or? I think 'cause I, because I think sometimes my instinct is almost like, well, you know, we already ask teachers to do a lot, uh, and you know, are we, is this something that now they feel like there's one more thing they need to do is also be on the, the leadership team?

No, they don't. They wouldn't have to. Right. And so we would have to sit down and decide, okay, so if you're going to be a teacher evaluator, like if you observe teachers, 'cause I think only teachers should be evaluating other teachers. And how many periods of release do you need for that? What qualifications do you need for that?

Like in my idea and pie in the sky of having a national professional association, there would be some kind of liaison at the US Department of Ed, and that would need to be one of us. And you would need to be released for two years even. But the thing is, is you need to stay tethered to the profession.

You, every year you're out of the classroom. You become relevant to a lot of these things, a little less and less. I'm not saying. There aren't administrators, I'm not saying there aren't school boards, but we are that check and balance, Paul, like we're the judiciary, we are a lifetime appointment and we can speak more freely and we're, we're missing, I guess is what I'm saying.

Does that, I don't know if I, when I say these things, I always wonder how much sense am I making? Does it sound, I don't know. What do you think? No, I, I, so I certainly, you know, it's, it's not, I think, totally wacky idea by any means, but it certainly is different than, um, I think most schools are organized and, you know, if I were gonna be, you know, if I wanted to make, uh, put, uh, the most optimistic framing on local control in education as possible, you know, I can imagine this being a case where this is, um, a potential advantage of local control as there might be places where locally this kind of thing can be implemented in a way that it can't be a.

Um, as easily, you know, a statewide or nationwide or something. Um, and so, you know, maybe there are pockets of places that could try out something like this, uh, to get a, you know, to give us a sense for how, um, how, how helpful and effective, um, it is. Thank you. I think that wraps up our conversation for today.

Would you be willing to come back on in another time to talk about other issues or this one even more? Yeah. Yay. Uh, what do you wanna leave the listeners with? Any final thoughts? Um, the, I, you know, I think, um, my, I think my, you know, I described, uh, what I think are the key points. I think just, you know, that I'd reiterate is I think this is a, a place where, uh, the available evidence on, if talking about teacher shortages, I think, you know, the available evidence is limited in a lot of important ways.

And to the extent that we have evidence, and I think this is true about all the evidence we have, whether we're talking about vacancies, whether we're talking about teacher licensor, whether we're talking about teacher quality in some abstract sense, I think no matter what, how we define teacher shortage, something that, uh, is very consistent is that these are, um, highly varied problems that are highly localized.

They disproportionately affect kids who are educationally most disadvantaged already. They affect certain types of positions, certain geographies. And keeping that variation in mind, I think is, um, is really key to, um, addressing, um, the, the shortages that exist. Can I ask one more question? Would you say it is a crisis in those uh, pockets?

I think there are definitely pockets where it is a crisis. Um, I think that's a perfectly plausible, um, way of describing it, particularly in some of the, the, you know, the most disadvantaged schools, um, which are off also the ones where ideally I would like the services to be strongest. Mm-hmm. We agree for sure.

Thank you Paul. I so appreciate your time and um, thank you for the research that you've done, and would you please pass it on to your colleagues? Your paper is awesome. Yeah, happy to. That's it for today. Thanks for listening, everyone. Don't forget to go to teacher shortage crisis.com to sign the petition and join the movement to save K 12 schooling and our democracy.

And remember, we may just be teachers, but we're the only ones who can fix this mess.